Artists & Works

STYLE: NOUVEAUX REALISMES,
HOMAGE TO PICASSO

Born in France, Niki de Saint Phalle grew up in America, attending private school and, in her teens, working as a fashion model. She eloped with writer Harry Matthews at eighteen. In 1952, the couple moved to Paris, where she began to study art seriously, meet artists, and make her own art, in spite of a growing family. She first became known for her “target” paintings in 1960, where she would shoot assemblages of paint-filled balloons and aerosol paint cans with a .22-caliber rifle. She then became a member of the Nouveau Realistes, a group that included Arman, Cesar, Christo, Gerard Deschamps, and others. In the mid-sixties, she began making female relief figures and in 1965-66, she created the huge “hon” (“she” in Swedish), a huge reclining female figure, whose internal architecture was entered through the vagina. The internal rooms included a cinema, an aquarium, a planetarium, and restaurants (including a milk bar). This work led to the creation of a series of female sculptures, called Nanas. De Saint Phalle has also created Skinnys, a series of linear figures, and a series of works based on the Tarot, including a Tarot garden in Tuscany. Her public art installations and other works can be seen all over the world, including major museum collections. She has also created a perfume, whose distinctive bottle she designed.

Niki de Saint Phalle’s work anticipated the feminist celebrations of female identity and subjectivity seen in the eighties art world. De Saint Phalle’s Nanas reclaim the female body as a site of joyful, tactile pleasure, rather than as an object of voyeuristic viewing, or as an aggressive, threatening presence (as the grotesque women of, for example, a de Kooning painting, could be viewed). The artist’s print for the Homage to Picasso portfolio is no exception to this type of celebratory depiction of women. In the print, Nanas fly through the air, under the words “Salut Pablo.” An unmistakably male figure (representing Picasso?) eyes the Nanas with cheerful lust.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Suzanne Muchnic, Los Angeles Times, 5/31/98
Sweet-tempered and lovable as Saint Phalle's art may appear, it's the product of deep conflicts and convictions. Her fantastic animals, Tarot characters and trademark "Nanas"--you know, those gigantic bathing beauties who shamelessly flaunt their bulbous breasts and thunder thighs--are the work of a disarmingly unpretentious artist who confesses to being motivated by guilt and a need to prove herself.
Her resume is equally paradoxical. An internationally renowned artist--and one of a very few women known primarily for monumental sculpture--she has created major public projects in Europe and executed large private commissions in the United States. Yet she's sometimes seen as a rather marginal artist whose work is too playful to be taken seriously.
... Saint Phalle's best-known works, the monumental female figures, or "Nanas," are generally interpreted as jubilant celebrations of women's freedom and power. But they evolved from a series of sculptures based on roles women play, including brides weighed down by tradition, mothers in labor,  and prostitutes.